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Vol. 79/No. 39 November 2, 2015
(lead article)
Washington seeks road to
maintain hold in Middle East
BY MAGGIE TROWE
After more than four-and-a-half years of civil war in Syria, the
government of President Bashar al-Assad, reinforced by Russian air
attacks and a ground offensive that includes combat troops from Iran and
the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, is reversing months of
losses by the dictatorial regime in Damascus. Reinforced government
troops are gaining ground in western Syria and have launched a battle to
recapture the strategic city of Aleppo from opposition groups, including
forces backed by Washington.
The war, which began with Assad’s brutal repression of popular protests
for political rights in 2011, has so far left 250,000 dead and displaced
more than 11 million — half the population. Many of those with the means
have fled for Europe.
U.S. imperialism remains the dominant world power, but is far weaker
than when its World War II victory allowed Washington to impose a
Mideast order in its interests. With the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the Stalinist regimes across Eastern Europe more than two decades
ago, Washington lost Moscow’s help in curbing and corrupting
revolutionary movements in the Middle East and elsewhere.
As the old imperialist world order unravels, the U.S. rulers have sought
new alliances to maintain stability and a measure of dominance, through
the recent nuclear accord with Iran and “reset” with Russia.
The speed and forcefulness of Russia’s move into Syria took the Barack
Obama administration aback. Russian President Vladimir Putin is shoring
up Russian access to Mediterranean ports and strengthening Moscow’s hand
in politics in the region, in collaboration with Tehran and Baghdad.
Moscow claims it is joining in efforts to stop the terrorist Islamic
State, but in fact it’s focused on efforts to reinforce the Assad regime.
For the first time since the civil war began, Assad traveled outside
Syria to meet with Putin in Moscow Oct. 20.
While the U.S. government carries out aerial attacks on Islamic State,
Kurdish forces have sustained the most effective and successful fight on
the ground. In Syria, Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) regained
17 villages in the Mt. Abdulaziz area of Hasakah province, reporting
more than 100 Islamic State soldiers killed in an early October offensive.
The U.S. rulers — like the capitalist governments of Iraq, Syria, Turkey
and Iran — oppose the ambitions of some 30 million Kurds for a homeland,
but they benefit from Kurdish advances on the ground.
Washington recently ended a $500 million program to train fighters
against Islamic State who had to agree not to use their weapons against
Assad. The Pentagon said it was able to field less than a dozen such
troops.
Instead, they have begun to pass more weapons along to already existing
groups on the ground. Some forces resisting the regime’s new
Moscow-backed offensive say they have gotten their hands on U.S.-made
TOW anti-tank weapons.
No alternative for Washington
Some U.S. politicians and pundits — from Republican Sen. John McCain to
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — have assailed
Obama’s “inaction” in Syria and called for stepped-up direct U.S.
intervention. Clinton and others have called for Washington to impose a
“no-fly zone” over parts of Syria, enforcement of which would pose
confrontations with Russian planes.
Bernie Sanders, vying with Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination,
opposes that proposal and backs Obama.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump has expressed support for Russian
airstrikes against Islamic State and reluctance about U.S. intervention.
During a Sept. 20 interview with Trump, Fox News commentator Bill
O’Reilly said, “Once Putin gets in and fights ISIS on behalf of Assad,
Putin runs Syria. He owns it. He’ll never get out, never.”
“Do you want to run Syria? Do you want to own Syria?” Trump replied. “I
want to rebuild our country.”
“I’m looking at Assad and saying, ‘Maybe he’s better than the kind of
people that we’re supposed to be backing,’” Trump added.
In a similar vein, ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan in an op-ed column
titled “The Antiwar Insurgency,” argued that the U.S. invasion of Iraq
led to the rise of Islamic State. “For anti-interventionists, Trump vs.
Sanders is the ideal race,” Buchanan wrote, saying Sanders and Trump
were gaining support because they opposed the Iraq war and today’s U.S.
intervention in Syria.
Political figures from differing backgrounds have argued there is little
basis for any course counter to the one being pursued by the Obama
administration. “Republican bloviating about ‘weakling’ Obama
notwithstanding, any future president will face this foreign-policy
dilemma: The distance between America’s idea of itself and what it can
plausibly achieve is widening,” wrote New York Times columnist Roger
Cohen Oct. 15.
“The destruction of ISIS is more urgent than the overthrow of Bashar
Assad,” Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of
state under the Nixon and Ford administrations, said in an op-ed article
in the Wall Street Journal the next day. Washington’s acquiescence to a
Russian military role in Syria made sense, he said, because the two
countries share “compatible objectives” in the fight against Islamic State.
He wrote that in a possible future federated Syria “a context will exist
for the role of Mr. Assad, which reduces the risks of genocide or chaos
leading to terrorist triumph.”
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